Soon, your brand may want to “AIR it”
The new Adobe AIR platform (Beta) promises to be a boon for brands. If AIR delivers on its potential, brands may soon burst forth with new drama—and relevance—in new digital dimensions.
You can think of Adobe AIR as a feature-rich way to connect your brand with customers via computers and digital devices. AIR has been developed to combine the immediacy of the Web with the power and graphics of desktop applications. Potentially, it’s a “best of both worlds” platform that brand builders can use to extend their brands into new contexts, and to create many new levels of customer experience and interaction.
(AIR is Adobe’s new brand name for its updated rich Internet platform previously code-named Apollo. I’ve written about Apollo and brands here and here.)
Realizing the dream of “rich” brand applications
Adobe AIR represents another step toward realizing the brand-builder’s dream of “rich” personal brand applications that can act as a “second skin” to customers. AIR may enable your brand to act as a digital sidekick, personalized to the customer, always on, timely, deep, trustworthy, engaging, interactive and portable.
Potentially, AIR’s multimedia and functional capabilities open up vibrant new avenues of brand/customer interaction.
A new world for brands
From my perspective, it’s not an exaggeration to say that AIR opens a new world for brands. If your brand has primarily existed as a name 
or a symbol, AIR can make it come alive in new (digital) customer context. In effect, AIR lets you transform your brand into a customer-focused application to do something fundamentally useful, or something astonishingly cool. This can be anything that connects you and your customers around a shared passion. It’s a way to bundle the customer to the protean meme that’s you. You may not think of your business or brand as a meme, but AIR may well change the game in this direction.
Proof of concept applications
You can check out the first blush of AIR applications at the Adobe AIR showcase gallery. Many of these are in the “proof of concept” stage, but observe how Anthropologie uses AIR in an online retail setting. There are some nifty features here, but they only scratch the surface of AIR’s creative brand potential.
For instance, your brand might use AIR to create a free soft phone for customers. Let them call each other during a prime-time event, such as the Super Bowl or March Madness. Add whatever features you want to the phone to make their interactions with each other, and with you, more compelling.
Another potential brand application using AIR
I can imagine visiting an art exhibit with AIR on a digital device, and downloading an exhibit guide on entering via Wi-Fi. Now the guide is on my device, along
with a map of the museum. It provides me with audio, music and visual analyses of the art on display, plus layers of background detail. If I want, I can add notes as I meander through the artwork. I can shift back and forth between artists, and even compare works on the screen. Or I might select the different works I want to see and have the guide plot a course for me through the halls. One part of the guide is a retail shop, so as I’m traipsing around I can order prints, which will be waiting for me at the museum shop at the end of my tour. Later, I’ll transfer the guide to my laptop, where it will be a detailed memento of my visit, possibly with a live link to the museum for news on upcoming exhibits and events.
The museum may provide this guide in support of its own brand, or it may be co-sponsored by a brand that shares common ground with exhibit visitors. With AIR, what starts with an event may become a long-term connection.
Widgets
AIR is tailor made for widgets, and AIR widgets may eventually rule the widget and gadget class. They can include so much more of the customer than other current widget/gadget approaches.
Our brand needs a lift: let’s AIR it
AIR is scheduled for formal release later this year. The AIR platform holds such promise for digital brand connections that brand teams may soon be discussing which new brand applications deserve the rich features of an AIR treatment. “Let’s AIR it” may become a brand mantra in 2008 and beyond.